Being fat in middle age protects against dementia and AD

[tobieagle]

Skinny hypothyroid people (I was in that category years ago) often compensate with high adrenaline which ramps lipolysis up.
This compensation keeps the metabolic rate up and you are able to perform pretty good for a given time.
But all the ingested PUFA gets metabolized.

What's worse than PUFA in your fat tissues?
Chronic high PUFA concentrations in your bloodstream and active cells.

Getting fat and burning the trash with adrenaline are 2 different adaptive responses to the same kind of problems and they yield different results/side effects.
I can't see a paradox here.

However I often think about the different advantages and disadventages of both adaptive routes.
I find this topic extremely interesting.
My guess is that the really skinny hypothyroid people probably won't get as old as the ones who get fat.
But time will tell.
Another thing that I observed from my personal surroundings is that the skinny type tends to have sleep problems/light sleep whereas the fat type tends to sleep like a rock.

 

[brandonk]

Skinny hypothyroid people (I was in that category years ago) often compensate with high adrenaline which ramps lipolysis up.
This compensation keeps the metabolic rate up and you are able to perform pretty good for a given time.
But all the ingested PUFA gets metabolized.

What's worse than PUFA in your fat tissues?
Chronic high PUFA concentrations in your bloodstream and active cells.

Getting fat and burning the trash with adrenaline are 2 different adaptive responses to the same kind of problems and they yield different results/side effects.
I can't see a paradox here.

However I often think about the different advantages and disadventages of both adaptive routes.
I find this topic extremely interesting.
My guess is that the really skinny hypothyroid people probably won't get as old as the ones who get fat.
But time will tell.
Another thing that I observed from my personal surroundings is that the skinny type tends to have sleep problems/light sleep whereas the fat type tends to sleep like a rock.

The so-called "skinny"/"fat" distinction misses the point. It is only the kind of adipose tissue that matters. The harmful kind of adiposity is called visceral obesity, which is like a ticking time-bomb in a constant state of chronic, low-grade inflammation. But this visceral obesity can exist whether the body type is described as "skinny" or "fat". The only way to be sure you do or don't have it is to have an MRI. 75% of people do have visceral obesity, and that number is growing so fast it's estimated that in ten years nearly everyone will have it (if the current rate of growth continues).

I very much wish the terms "fat" and "skinny" could be used less often if only out of common courtesy to others. Both words are, unfortunately, often used in a pejorative way, and thus even when a pejorative use is not intentional, for many the words may still be fraught with emotional overtones. The title of this topic, for example, which starts with the phrase "Being fat," strikes me as a gratuitous use of the word "fat". (But maybe that's just me.)

In any case, a more helpful description might be something like "waist-hips ratio". A waist-hip ratio that exceeds 0.9 among males, or 0.85 among females, was recently found to be the most significant source of premature death. See more at: https://www.raypeatforum.com/forum/view ... 85#p111285

Studies, like the one cited by the OP, that do not control for waist-hip ratio should arguably be disregarded. References:
Sahakyan KR, Somers VK, Rodriguez-Escudero JP, et al. Normal-weight central obesity: implications for total and cardiovascular mortality. Ann Intern Med. 2015; doi: 10.7326/M14-2525
Poirier P. The many paradoxes of our modern world: is there really an obesity paradox or is it only a matter of adiposity assessment? Ann Intern Med. 2015; doi: 10.7326/M15-2435